Hi guys, this is my first post on these forums. My family is thinking about getting a new laptop, so I figured we might as well get a laptop that will be able to run the games in the description well on dolphin. I'll be running the games with a pretty no-frills configuration (native resolution, etc.) and stick to 2 player matches for best performance.

I've heard that 4 GB ram should be sufficient to run the above games and that the graphics card/integrated graphics doesn't really matter unless you plan on running at above native resolution (which I won't). I've also heard that single-threaded performance is most important for Dolphin and that intel is a better choice than amd in that sense. Doing a search for "intel laptop" on amazon brings up plenty of laptops at or under $450 (which is our budget) with 4 GB ram, but I'm not sure which processor would be the best for dolphin because I've heard traditional performance measures can belie how well they will run games in dolphin. Here are some of the ones I see sorted by clock rate (I assume higher is better, but just in case I included those with lower clock rates):

Most APUs are bad for games right now on Dolphin. Ultra low voltage CPUs are simply out of the question. You´ll have more chances with i5-4200M (note that I put the M suffix instead of U, since M is generally stronger than U models when talking about Dolphin).

I found an HP envy 15 that indeed has that processor, the bad thing is that costs US$542, more or less.

Just too small of a budget really. The minimum you want to be looking at like Barry said is a 4xxx series processor. I assume a desktop is out of the question, but a $450 desktop will run circles around a laptop of the same price.